


They Broke Their Backs Lifting Moloch To Heaven

by Jenni_Snake



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Drug Use, Ficlet, Gen, black market
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:31:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/922015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenni_Snake/pseuds/Jenni_Snake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Pentecost could go fuck himself. There was profit to be had.</em>
</p><p>M rating for language.</p><p>(For Jaegercon Bingo Prompt: Black Market)</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Broke Their Backs Lifting Moloch To Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> (This is a pseudo-'chapter' in a ficverse that won't leave my head, or it can be read it on its own. Comments valued at $500 a pound.)

The Boneslums were not a great area to invest in property, but it depended on what you were looking for. Still, if you had the funds you could do yourself up something real nice. Inner beauty, at least.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, setting up in front of the Temple, being stared at by the skeleton of Kaiceph that sat on the land the doomsday cult had poached out from under the dead kaiju before his team had even finished stripping the corpse. It had seemed like good advertising, if a little obvious. Now, though, the balcony view made him angry. Not at night: it was beautiful at night, like a whore under a streetlamp, you couldn’t see the worn hem of her dress, and the light turned her weary frown into a coquettish pout. It was all about the spectacle.

But during the day the skull’s eye sockets were lit up by the misty sunlight seeping through the clouds, its grey rib cage curving its hands to the heavens in supplication. It was pathetic.

Hannibal gripped the railing tightly. The war had come to an end about as abruptly as he himself nearly had the night before. _Swallow their food whole_ and _relatively low stomach acid content_ were two pieces of new information he had mentally filed away about the kaiju. The third piece, however, was the most disturbing.

He cursed himself and banged his fist hard on the railing, a seven-year-old memory picking at the back of his brain like a horsefly.

When he had received the letter, he had crumpled it up only half-read. It was 2018 - who the fuck sent letters anymore, anyway? Stacker Pentecost, that was who. Probably had some overworked and underpaid secretary designing PPDC letterhead day and night so that he could send off his official fucking notices.

_Eyes Only - kaiju brain matter has been found in drift-centres as far afield as Vancouver, New York City and Amsterdam - Direct Order - violation of terms of contract - cease all sale of unprocessed organic materials immediately_

Hannibal hadn’t like being lectured about what he should and shouldn’t sell - that was not the agreement he had signed with Pentecost. He hadn’t signed anything, of course, he had to give Pentecost credit for that, but he also knew he couldn’t be held to having made any oral agreements he knew he wouldn’t keep; Frankie Lin’s legal experience during the proceedings had made sure of that. If kaiju brain matter was making it onto the drifting scene, how could he be held fucking accountable for it? If someone out there was getting the ultimate high off bits of kaiju grey matter, who was he to stop them from having their fun? Pentecost's people were the ones who should be in shit, having let the technology slip through their fucking hands in the first place. Dry up the demand, and the supply will take care of itself.

Hannibal had balanced the ball of paper on the railing and flicked it into the dim street below. He’d be damned if the underground drug trade was going to stop him. Besides, it was their problem, not his. Lao Fei, who had always been invaluable, kept her ear to the ground, scanning the media for any references right as the broadsheets and tabloids came off the presses, passed him along anything he needed to know. So far, he could only successfully recognize the characters for ‘kaiju,’ and his own name, which was why, he reminded himself, he employed people to do the rest for him. And he hated reading. He remembered an article Lao Fei had cut out for him two weeks before, a perfectly translated precis scribbled onto the sticky note that she had pasted to it. _Hong Kong Drifting Bust - kaiju brain samples seized - notorious Mad Hatter den shut down_ \- it was all he had read. He had shrugged.

And then Pentecost was getting in his face about it, as if it was his problem. As long as he got his cut, what the fuck more did he care? You couldn’t stop the free market. There was hardly anything that could be processed out of kaiju brain, lung or heart muscle, but if he could sell the mixture, ‘kaiju chum,’ to whoever would pay for it, why lose out on the profit? It was that, or pay some unscrupulous dumping company who treated it like human biological waste and dumped, buried, paved over and built a golf course on top of it, or maybe even took the time and expense to have it incinerated.

Pentecost could go fuck himself. There was profit to be had.

Hannibal felt his nail crack as he gripped the wooden railing and snapped back to the present. There was one more piece of information that made him regret his past naïeveté, two words uttered by what must have been one of the world’s most idiotic scientists: hive mind.

The war with the kaiju had never been a war - it had always been resistance. There was no question about whose side humanity was on, because there was no other side. The enemy wasn’t making deals, they weren’t offering a higher price for counterintelligence, and now it was obvious that they had been getting it for free, although until Geiszler, it hadn’t likely been worth as much. Still, there was only one result that could come from an enemy whose end goal was the total annihilation of the human race: the loss of the market altogether. And if that happened, what was the point?

He tried not to think about how it was going to affect his profit margin when he gave the order to start burning the shit.

 


End file.
